


Someday to Be Bright

by louciferish



Series: Fanfiction for Reproductive Rights [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Let's end this, Light Angst, M/M, POV Victor Nikiforov, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 19:05:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19026055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louciferish/pseuds/louciferish
Summary: Post-episode eleven, in a world where everything is the same except there's time travel, Victor Nikiforov wanders into an agency hoping to relive his happiest days with Yuuri. Instead, he finds himself catapulted into a future he never knew he could have.





	Someday to Be Bright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AzaWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AzaWhite/gifts).



> This story is part of a project I'm doing, filling fic prompts in exchange for donations to non-profits that support reproductive choice. You can find more information on this project [on my Twitter](https://twitter.com/louciferish/status/1128663167658340353).
> 
> The prompt here was for time travel fluff, but I have a hard time conceiving of folks deciding to time travel because they're happy. Gotta have some worries to initiate it! So I went with canon angst as a launching point and I hope the rest makes up for it.
> 
> Thank you to Chrome for the beta read-through!

Victor wanders through the busy streets of Barcelona with Yuuri’s words still ringing in his ears.

_Let’s end this_.

It’s hard to believe just yesterday he was walking these same paths with his arm over Yuuri’s shoulders, a new bit of gold on his finger and a bright future streaming out ahead. Now, he’s alone, fumbling for the threads of his thoughts. He’ll need to stitch them together before the end of the Final. No matter what, he still needs to be there as Yuuri’s coach.

The streets are bustling and unfamiliar. The Christmas market is still set up, and Victor skirts around it, dancing away from the raw memories there. He swerves off down another busy side street, pushing through throngs of excited tourists and tipsy, celebratory locals. Through the swirls of light and language lapping at him, Victor spots a familiar logo on a sign up ahead: the letters T and F embraced in a circle. _Tempus Fugit_.

Victor has never had much interest in time travel. For all their technological advances, time travel agencies can still only place one’s consciousness in the past, not the physical form. Clients can relive their favorite moments, but are left helpless to alter their mistakes. 

Victor’s greatest triumphs had all been recorded by hundreds of television cameras, posted online for anyone to see. If he wanted to experience one again, he could hop on YouTube. He’s never had a need for time travel.

But today changes that. Seeing the sign hanging over the little wooden door, he experiences a fierce longing for what _was_. If only he and Yuuri had a bit more time. If only, once more, he could see the way that Yuuri slowly opened up to him, blooming like a rose in the heat of Hasetsu’s summer sun.

Before he can give it too much thought, Victor swerves toward the sign, pushing his way through the door beneath. The little shop front is warm and pristine, all smooth lines and steel fixtures despite the crumbling stone facade outside, and Victor reaches up to yank his scarf and coat open as he approaches the desk.

The dark-haired girl working has big brown eyes like his Yuuri, but she speaks very little English and only a few words of French. Victor speaks three languages with some fluency, and several more very badly, but he has almost no Spanish. 

Between a mish-mash of vowels, he works with the girl to cobble together what he needs—he’ll go back only a few months, for an hour or so. It should be plenty of time to see his Yuuri, and to take one more taste of the hope he felt in those early summer days.

After signing the necessary waivers, Victor leaves his credit card with the desk and goes down the hallway beyond to one of the half dozen private rooms for guests. From the hall, he can hear the stirrings of other voices as other clients relive their sweetest days. Then, his door closes, and he’s alone with the device.

It’s simpler than he expected. A visor is perched on the arm of a comfortable sofa. Next to it, the controls are set into a gleaming steel pillar. The little screen displays a bright red, scrolling _Hola, bienvenido_.

There’s a panel of dials below the screen with which to set his destination, and it stops Victor short. Of course, the names by the buttons are in _Spanish_. Victor squints at the dials and tries to piece it together. Between Spanish and French, some words are quite similar. Others are… not. He could call for the employee, but they already had communication issues before. It might not help at all. He decides to figure it out on his own.

After a few minutes of fiddling, Victor steps back, satisfied that he’s done his best. There’s a specific day he’d love to get to—together on the beach, sand sticking to skin where sugary sweets had melted before and Makkachin chasing gulls in the distance—but any day would be fine. Any day would be one more day with Yuuri.

Victor picks up the visor and fits it over his eyes, reclining on the sofa nearby to prepare himself. At least when it comes to starting, language is no barrier. He can safely assume the big green button means “Go”.

As he punches the button, the room around him fades away, then goes dark.

For a moment, he thinks something’s gone wrong, and then his eyes blink open and the light spills in.

Something _is_ wrong. He knows it from the moment his eyes finally focus and he finds himself looking across the room, not at the wood-framed paper doors of Yu-topia, but at the plain white paint that coats the walls of his apartment. _I’ve gone back too far_ , he thinks with desperation. It’s the worst possible outcome—no Yuuri at all, for all his trouble, only Makkachin and skating and loneliness, a day like any other. 

He sits up on the edge of the bed and experiences his first bout of stomach-twisting dissonance. Victor is only an observer in his own body. His impulse is to push to his feet and leave the room, but this other Victor, memory-Victor, has no such urge. He waits on the bed, rolling his head to loosen his neck and massaging his thighs just above the knee.

Victor tries to relax, to rein in his instinct to uselessly push at his own body. He’s trying to force himself calm, when the sound of metal scraping through the open bedroom door makes him freeze. _What?_ Momentarily off his guard, he forgets to resist as his other self finally stands, walking through the bedroom door and out to the main part of the apartment.

His living room looks much the same, except where it doesn’t. There’s a soft grey blanket draped over the back of the sofa, and a chair he doesn’t recognize in the corner. His old functional coffee table has been replaced with a new one—square and short, with cushions on the floor around it. He can still hear the scraping, now clearly coming from the kitchen, and resists the urge to push again at the body he can’t control. 

This other Victor is _too slow_ , though—painfully lacking in curiosity about the damn sound. He rounds the corner into the kitchen, and Makka comes hurtling toward him, her nails clacking on the hardwood, pursued by a smaller, dark shadow. 

The unfamiliar little dog leaps into the air, springloaded, and collides with Victor’s knees. He bends down to pet Makka and lowers his hand for the other, chocolate-colored toy poodle to rub itself against. 

“Good morning,” Victor murmurs to the dogs before straightening up, his eyes resting on a familiar figure hovering over the stove. 

_Yuuri_. 

Behind strange eyes, Victor’s heart does a flip. Even though the other man has his back turned, Victor would know that body anywhere—he’s as familiar with the curve of those muscles as he is the planes of his own face. 

Yuuri looks _good_ —fit and trim, yes, but also happy. His hips sway along with some song he’s humming, something Victor doesn’t recognize, and his thick black hair has gotten shaggy, curling down at the base of his neck and past his jaw. Victor’s fingers itch to touch it.

Luckily, the other Victor does him one better. He steps forward, crossing the kitchen in a few short strides to wrap his arms around Yuuri’s trim waist, settling his nose behind the curve of Yuuri’s jaw. He inhales, and Victor recognizes the vanilla and orchid notes of his own favorite shampoo. 

“Good morning to you, too,” Victor says, his lips brushing the rough edges of Yuuri’s chin, where neither of them has yet shaved. Yuuri has wireless headphones in, but he pops one out before leaning back into Victor’s embrace, and a tinny version of the same unfamiliar tune wraps around them. Victor feathers kisses along the back of Yuuri’s neck and feels him shiver.

“Finally up?” Yuuri asks, his tone playful. He puts aside his spatula, turning down the heat on the stove, and folds his arms over Victor’s. “Makka and Mochi were about to beat down the door if you didn’t come out soon.”

“I’m about to be thirty in a few days,” Victor responds, petulant. “I need the extra beauty sleep.” 

_Thirty_. Victor had suspected as soon as he saw Yuuri in the kitchen, but that confirms it. Instead of going back to the past summer, he’d somehow set the dials forward— _two years_ ahead. 

Even as his own mind is reeling, trying to play catch-up with everything around him, Future Victor is simply relaxed, playful. He rests his chin on Yuuri’s shoulder, taking Yuuri’s hand and then trying to use their joined grip to flip the omelet on the stove. 

“Victor,” Yuuri scolds, exasperated but still fond. “Stop distracting me, or we’ll wind up with scrambled eggs instead of omelets _again_.” 

“Who’s distracting?” Future Victor asks, but he releases Yuuri’s hand and then takes a step back. 

Victor wants to look around the kitchen, to take in all the little details that make his same boring apartment suddenly seem warm and lived-in, but he can’t pry his attention from the gleaming gold rings he saw, side by side where Yuuri’s fingers had intertwined with his own. 

_Let’s end this_ , Yuuri had said, but here they are—two years later, with their rings still on. They’re not just together, not only living together, but comfortable with each other. Even though this Future Victor is still him, and this future is still his own, Victor feels like an interloper here, trespassing into something not just intimate, but sacred.

“I’m going to go ahead and get dressed,” Victor says. His fingers trail down the cool stainless steel countertops as he moves toward the exit, the dogs following along behind. “As much as I love your butt in those yoga pants, you may want to change before our appointment at ten.”

Yuuri wrinkles his nose, as if the concept of wearing jeans out of the house is a foul one. “Which house is Natalya taking us to today?”

“The row house by the river. The one with three bedrooms.”

“Three bedrooms, but no _yard_ ,” Yuuri corrects him, then sighs. “The extra room would be good, but I don’t know. I always pictured raising kids somewhere they could play outside.”

“Give it a chance, darling. It doesn’t hurt to look.” Future Victor is very blase about what Yuuri just said. Inside him, Victor is shaking. House-hunting. _Children_. If Victor could make a noise, he’s not sure what mangled sound would come out, but it would be loud.

As he walks through the living room, back to the bedroom to get dressed, Victor passes a wall of built-in shelves. In his own time, these are covered in books, but now there are new displays mixed in, and Victor’s mind scrambles to take them all in as his future self brushes past them. 

There are medals—gold, silver, and bronze. He recognizes the designs on some from past years, while others are new—Worlds medals, Grand Prix medals, _Olympic_ medals. If he had any control, he’d certainly take a closer peek at those. 

Among the medals are photos as well—Victor and Yuuri in the Kiss and Cry; Victor and Yuuri on a podium together, tears in both their eyes. There’s a photo with a pale blue _It’s A Boy_ announcement banner, with the two of them holding a basket with the toy poodle puppy inside, and another on a beach. In that one, they’re both dressed in tuxedos with matching roses in the lapels, their hands joined between their chests.

Victor’s heart aches in the best way. Part of him never believed he could have this, not ever. Meeting Yuuri had changed that, but still it seems like more than he deserves. He’s so _lucky_. People always told him that, but they usually meant competitively. Victor hated that—luck had nothing to do with the work he put into honing his skills. But they must be right. He must be the luckiest man alive, if this is his future. 

He reaches the bedroom and opens his closet. His things hang side by side with Yuuri’s, the edges overlapping into shared items, and this blending of their things shatters him almost as badly as the photos had. It’s more than he’d dared to hope for.

Future Victor’s hand is just closing on the neck of a hanger when the world goes fuzzy. Everything fritzes, like a television fading to static, and then it goes dark.

Once again, Victor can feel the weight of the Tempus Fugit visor seated on his face. He reaches up to remove it and wipes away tears still hanging in the corners of his eyes. His heart is racing, and he folds his hand over it to feel the strong beat beneath his fingers. He searches himself to place the feeling surging through him and finds it’s… joy.

He wants to see Yuuri.

On his way out the door, the clerk tries to hand him something—a survey about his experience, he thinks—but Victor declines. He has no interest in anything that would force him to wait a moment longer. He sweeps through the door and starts to walk back to their hotel. Halfway there, he begins to jog, and by the time he reaches the doors, he’s been running. 

He takes the stairs up to their room, unable to wait for the elevator to arrive, and by the time he reaches their floor, he’s puffing for breath. 

The hotel key unlocks the door with a whirring click, and Victor pushes inside. He stops on the threshold. 

Yuuri is seated at the foot of one of the beds, with just a white towel wrapped around his waist. The only illumination in the room is the flickering light of the TV, and when Yuuri looks at the door, the light reflects off tear tracks on his cheeks. 

“I-” Yuuri begins, but his voice breaks. He swallows. “I didn’t want to go to bed yet. I didn’t know if you wanted-” He breaks off again and gestures to the beds. They’re still pushed together, connected from the night before. 

Victor steps inside and crosses the room, where he drops to his knees at Yuuri’s feet, ignoring the twinge of pain he gets from it like an old habit. Yuuri’s hands are hot and damp still from the shower as Victor folds his freezing fingers around them, and he searches Yuuri’s eyes. He still looks at Victor the same way.

“I want whatever you want,” Victor promises. “I’ve been thinking, Yuuri, and I want you to know… No matter what you decide after the Final, I’m going to support you. My promise at the airport—it wasn’t only about your skating career. I want to support you,” he bends his head, pressing a kiss to the gold on Yuuri’s finger, “I want to support you for your whole life.”

When Victor looks up, he finds Yuuri’s brown eyes brimming with tears. His lips are moving, but no words escape. Instead, he pulls his hand from Victor’s own and reaches out with shaking fingers to stroke the falling silver of Victor’s bangs away from his eyes. 

Content, Victor lets his head fall forward to rest on Yuuri’s knee. No matter what Yuuri decides after the free skate, Victor knows he’s made the right choice. For once, he knows the future that lies ahead of them is brighter than any gold could ever be.

The TV behind him flickers and a song begins to play. Victor recognizes the tune with a jolt—the same song Future Yuuri had been listening to in the kitchen. The hand in his hair stills briefly.

“I love this song,” Yuuri says, and Victor nods against his skin. A piece of himself uncurls and begins to work on something new—the program would open like _this_ , and then—

Victor has a lot of changes to prepare for.


End file.
